


Myths, Legends, Monsters

by Adiros Alitros (Adira_Tyree)



Category: Original Work
Genre: Gen, Mutants, Mutation, Post-Apocalypse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-24
Updated: 2015-04-24
Packaged: 2018-03-25 12:54:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,779
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3811297
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Adira_Tyree/pseuds/Adiros%20Alitros
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Consider this something that could have taken place several hundred years after Fractured. I wanted to continue to work with the same world, but cover a different topic than war. In this case, I was inspired to write about diversity. Of course, war still enters into it - how could it not? Take from it whatever metaphors you desire.</p><p>* This work was first published in <i>The Inklings: 2015</i>, by the Inklings of the University at Albany. Posted with permission.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Myths, Legends, Monsters

      If I hadn’t already seen him, I wouldn’t have believed he could exist.

      There were stories about men like him: tall, robust, skin filled to bursting with the muscles beneath – patchy red like a half-ripened fruit. Myths and legends, nothing more. Zeus. Hercules.

      But I saw him, standing just ahead in a clearing. Not a care in the world, just breathing in the late summer air and watching the river roll by.

      I lowered my bow. If I’d shot him, it could be me on somebody’s dinner table, not the doe I’d been stalking all morning. She’d disappeared, of course, bounding away through the shallow water that I didn’t dare approach.

      Kim had told me not to hunt here. “ _There’s monsters there, things that don’t belong in our world anymore_ ,” he’d said. “ _Left-over from the ruined world, with nowhere left to go. They live there because there’s nothing left for them anymore, but they can’t bring themselves to die._ ”

      But I’d never seen one, in all my time hunting in these woods. No giants, no chimeras, no mermaids or dragons. Even when I was still a little girl, I could remember playing by the river for hours and never seeing another living thing but for the birds.

      Maybe I just hadn’t been looking.

      I knew that if I backed away slowly, I could hide in the old bombed house by the road for as long as I needed. I’d locked away supplies for myself in a basement locker, just in case raiders set down on the village. Sure they hadn’t come in years, but it never hurt to be prepared.

      Something kept me rooted to the spot, though. Maybe it was just shock, maybe fascination. Maybe it was the war going on in my mind about whether or not the stories were true.

_Maybe he’s the only one._

_Maybe the rest are just stories._

_Maybe I’ve tripped over a rock and hit my head and this is all just a dream._

      I didn’t know if I’d been watching for a minute or for an hour, but eventually he must have felt my gaze on his back, because he looked over his shoulder – straight at me.

      I should have ran.

      I should have turned right then and ran.

      But why run from something that wasn’t chasing you?

      He was an ugly thing. His face, where on a man’s would have been smooth skin and angled bones, almost bubbled with… who knew what beneath. Lumpy, like hunks of fat stitched in beneath the skin where they didn’t belong. One eye was nearly hidden by it, the other was red like a demon’s.

      He should have come for me.

      He should have turned and come straight at me.

      But he didn’t.

      How could a monster just sit there and watch me watching him? Maybe he was luring me into a trap, a false sense of security so that I’d be easier to crush under one of his ham-sized fists. But he just turned back to face the river again, as though he hadn’t seen me. Or maybe he just didn’t see me as enough of a threat to bother with.

      My move.

      I raised my bow, arrow ready to fly. I only had one shot’s distance between us, so I had to make it count. It had to be good enough to shock him into enough time to let off another shot, again and again until he was dead. My breath was slow and steady; I had to focus. Had to aim just so…

      He looked at me again. Still he didn’t move towards me though, even with my shot lined up for his good eye. Again, he just turned back towards the river.

      I slipped the arrow back into my quiver, slung the bow across my chest. The air was warm and a hint of a breeze ruffled through my hair. Ahead, the river sparkled invitingly, and the giant still hadn’t moved.

      Then I was in front of the water too, right next to him, watching his reflection before willing myself to look at _him_.

      He was even bigger up close somehow, as though he’d grown in the time it took me to cross the clearing. Next to him, I could see that his skin _was_ smooth, it’s what was beneath that wasn’t. His eye wasn’t a demonic red, just a bloodshot mess from age. I could hear him breathing, each heavy breath just a little more difficult than the last.

      “I haven’t seen a human in a long time,” he said, not looking at me.

      I jumped, not expecting him to speak so intelligently, let alone speak at all.

      “Been even longer since I’ve seen one that decided not to shoot me,” he continued. “Very long time. Not many of you come here anymore.”

      “I haven’t seen one of you at all before… What… what are you?” I asked, not sure where to leave my gaze. _Is it impolite not to look a giant in the eye when he’s talking?_

      He sighed, shaking his head. “Doesn’t matter. Not for long.” I could see him watching me carefully in our reflected images in the water. “You’ve called us many things. We don’t really have a name. But I was just like you, a long time ago.”

      My eyes grew wide with alarm, my heart suddenly racing again. “There are more of you?” It took every ounce of self-control in my body to not run straight back into the woods, but my curiosity weighed more than my fear. “Wait, you were like me? What do you mean?”

      “Yes, and yes.” His voice thundered, deep and loud like he was shouting even though I was right next to him. “There’s few of us now, but we were all like you. Humans, years ago.” He finally looked over at me; I could see then that his half-covered eye was dull and grey – blinded.

      I almost wanted to laugh at his words, but I bit my tongue. _This **thing** was a human?_ Somehow it didn’t seem like a good idea to say it aloud. “I don’t understand.”

      “We don’t understand either,” he said, almost like a prayer. “But we were changed. Made this way.” He gestured to himself with a shrug.

      “How long ago?”

      “Too long.” His breathing turned to wheezing, and he coughed for a solid minute before he could speak again. “Too long,” he repeated, not adding anything to it.

      “They say you’re from the time of the Ruin,” I told him. “The elders do. But that can’t be true, can it?”

      “It can,” he said, nodding.

      “But that was over almost 200 years ago now,” I said, not hiding the disbelief on my face. “You can’t be that old, nothing lives like that.”

      “Has it been that long?” He growled out a guttural noise that made me shiver, but I think it must have been a laugh. “You lose track, eventually. When you are not allowed into the new, ‘civilized’ lands.”

      I didn’t have anything to say to that. The fact that he wasn’t attacking me, was answering my unending questions, suggested that he wasn’t as dangerous as he looked. But then, how could you judge the whole race on the actions of one? I cringed at my own thoughts. Maybe that was the point; you couldn’t judge a whole race.

      “Why didn’t you try to attack me when I was aiming at you?” I asked, uncertain. He’d have had every right to do it, after all.

      “I am dying,” he said bluntly, shrugging his massive shoulders as though it didn’t bother him. “After so long, I am finally giving out. I had no reason to stop you. I will meet my end soon, either way.”

      My heart sank down into my stomach; I wanted to scold it, me, for feeling sorry for this beast, but what was it that made him a beast? His looks alone? The rarity of his kind? Me? Then I wanted to scold myself for thinking such things.

      “I’m sorry,” I said quietly, unsure what else I could say or do.

      “Do not be,” he said shaking his head. “I have lived long enough. I grow tired of this life. I hope soon to be done with it.”

      “How can you say that?” I said, shocked. I took a step back, almost sickened by the idea of so calmly accepting one’s own death. Of welcoming it.

      He laughed, his wide grin showing massive, blunt teeth not so unlike my own. “I have lived long enough,” he repeated. “It will be better without us here. Things can return to the way they were before the war, before this _ruin_ you call it. Back to normal. Just normal people and normal wars. No more bombs to destroy the world. No more years of hiding underground for the planet to heal.”

      I didn’t want to think about it, about any of it. The past was best forgotten; none of it mattered, humanity survived and that was the important part. I slowly stepped backward, hoping the giant wouldn’t notice.

      “We will not meet again, human,” he said, turning back to the water, still smiling. He dipped his fingers into its cold, clear ripples. “At least, I do not expect so.”

      “Goodbye, then,” I said, awkwardly. How did you wish someone a happy death, anyway?

      “Goodbye,” he echoed, still watching the water. It sputtered up around his fingers, splashing the earth and the back of his hand. “Do not make the same choices of those before you. You would miss this beautiful place if you did.”

      I turned and ran, like I should have done before.

 

* * *

 

      It took me years to understand what he’d told me. That he hadn’t told _me_ not to destroy the world and humanity along with it, but that he’d told _us_. How happy he must have been to see it all back to the way it had been before.

      When I went back to the same place I’d seen him I was no longer a child. I had children of my own. I understood then that destroying the world the first time hadn’t just destroyed them, but their children. I’d learned, of course, in school of how pockets of humanity had survived in underground vaults and silos. That some places hadn’t been destroyed at all and had simply moved on without us.

      I sat down at the river, this time alone, and dipped my fingers in the cold, clear water. It was beautiful, crisp.

      And he was right, I never saw him again. It took too long for me to wish for him to have been wrong.


End file.
